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There is a huge difference between story and plot. Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
- Stephen King, "On Writing"
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January 28th, 2008
I went out there on Saturday morning to see Axis Films’ 3D production / post / exhibition demonstrations.
What I learned about 3D:
- If you want to sound like the Smartest Guy In The Room, you say “stereoscopic”, not “3D”.
- 8% of the population, for various reasons, are unable to properly apprehend stereoscopic movies.
- Stereoscopic movies are really neat.
- Stereoscopic movies give me a headache.
December 30th, 2007
THE SOUNDS OF NATURE, PART II:
Sound Editing in Nature Docs: The Second Narrator
by
Neal Romanek
(as printed in the October 2007
edition of TVBEurope)
If the nature documentary is one of the most important genres in British broadcasting, could Kate Hopkins and her colleague, Tim Owens, be among British broadcasting’s most important figures?
Hopkins and Owens have been sound designers on many groundbreaking wildlife documentaries, including the recent “Planet Earth” (2006), the BAFTA-winning “Blue Planet” (2001), and Sir David Attenborough’s “The Life Of Mammals” (2002). Should anyone dare suggest that documentary is a less “creative” genre than narrative programming, a conversation with Kate Hopkins will set them straight.
 Kate Hopkins and Tim Owens work out of their Bristol-based company, Wounded Buffalo. It takes them roughly three weeks to cut a 50-minute segment. Cutting sound on 50 minutes of “reality” TV would take a bare fraction of that time. In the case of the nature documentary, as much work – or more – must be done as on any narrative film of that length.
One of the great secrets of the nature doc, is that virtually all sound design is created in post. Sync sound, excepting commentary by Sir David Attenborough as he crouches next to a Bower Bird, is virtually never available. Wild tracks and atmospheres may be recorded at the location, but in most cases it falls to the sound editor to create the entire soundtrack from scratch.
The irony of designing sound for a high-quality nature documentary is that although the sound editor may be manufacturing the entire soundtrack herself, the final result must pass the kinds of rigorous tests of authenticity and accuracy that no other sound track must undergo. If a humpback whale song is cut into an underwater scene shot in Hawaiian waters, it must be the humpback’s traditional Hawaiian Islands song, which is utterly distinct from the song the animal sings, say, off the coast of Alaska. Few would notice such a difference, or even care, but this is what distinguishes a film that entertains from one that educates, enlightens and captures the quintessence of life on earth.
The other invisible artists of the nature doc sound design are foley artists. All non-specific sound – rustles, footfalls on leaves, snow crunching under paws, crabs clattering over rocks – are done in foley sessions.
The stunning aerial shots of “Planet Earth” were shot using the Cineflex helicopter mount, which allowed stable close-ups to be shot from thousands of meters away. The real sound captured at the scene is merely the roar of the helicopter. But once the foley artists have had their crack at it, and those effects have been edited and mixed, an entire new level of information is brought to the fore. Even seemingly innocuous sound cues, a crunch here, a splash there, are profoundly powerful storytelling tools.
The core of the sound designers job is understanding the peculiar twist of the human brain when an action is accompanied by a simultaneous sound, the human brain makes the assumption that the action itself was the cause of the sound, and an action that creates a sound takes on greater importance than one that does not. Thus a simple bit of foley accentuating one movement or another, or subtly emphasizing the rustling of a stalking lion, literally leads our eye to very specific places on the screen at very specific moments. Watching the real scene unfold in nature, we would be very likely to miss little details of action, intent, cause, effect that are integral to the sound design. BBC nature docs have two narrators – Sir David Attenborough, and the sound effects themselves.
“Planet Earth” is a milestone in broadcasting, not only for being a start-to-finish HD production, but for its 5.1 surround sound. “We knew it was going to be that right from the beginning, which helps a lot. Within a 5.1 mix, you tend to hear more. You can spread things around much more. It’s nice for atmospheres because you can have even more atmosphere in the surround, but still not lose the voice over in the middle. Most of the sound I’ve done has had the capability to be in 5.1. There were always enough layers there. But it’s whether there’s time in the mixing.”
Bird songs represent a textbook instance where a lack of sync sound recorded while shooting presents a potential nightmare. A bird’s song may be distinct not only to a particular species in a particular location, but to a particular bird performing one particular step in a mating ritual.
Hopkins notes, “The birds of paradise, for example, have calls which are very complicated. Even experts don’t always know exactly which call is which. Sometimes if a producer likes something, sometimes the accuracy can drift a little bit because dramatically it works better.” But more often than not, a researcher is called in with expertise in the appropriate area. “Tim did a scene with the capercaille, which is a bird notoriously difficult to lay sound for because it has such a complicated call. We had various people come in to check that it was right, and in the end it was absolutely fine. Bird calls are always the most difficult. One of the worst we had was trying to get a Mandarin duck calling her chicks. We put in the only recording that we had. It was the most awful recording. It was full of hiss, and at one point I thought, We just cannot put this in because it is so horrible. But it was accurate. And within the mix, between us and the mixer, we EQ’d it and put it through a lot of software. In the end it worked.”
One of Hopkins most challenging shows – and perhaps most rewarding – was “Blue Planet”.
Her ongoing collaboration with Tim Owens allows for a thematic unity throughout the series she works on. In the case of “Blue Planet” where whole sets of effects were being created, the clear and ongoing communication characteristic of their collaboration was essential to stay on course. To some degree, the creating of sound for “Blue Planet” was like building a sound track for a science fiction movie. Creating the effects in Earth’s most unexplored regions yielded some daring choices.
 “Obviously, most of ‘Blue Planet’ is underwater. It could have been just music and a general underwater track. But we decided, between the producers and the sound editors, that we were going to go for something different, because no one knows what you could actually hear underwater. There are some very natural sounds that you hear – humpback whales and shrimp clicking. But I added some much bigger noises – the fish going past – because it just adds to the strength of the images. And then there were some very tiny creatures too that I added some very strange, very designed noises. Whether it was real or not, I’m not sure that that mattered. It worked with the picture.”
Those who have seen “Blue Planet” will understand how much certain sequences hinge on their sound effects. The truly frightening scene of tuna tearing into a bait ball, for example, gains extraordinary impact from the “sound” made by the attacking tuna as they rocket past. We don’t for a moment forget the tuna is one of the fastest fish in the sea.
“If you have a huge bait ball swirling round and round and round, you just feel like you need to hear something. And I think that is what sound editing is all about – adding strength to the images. And you don’t always want to have music going through it. You need to hear what you think you might hear if you really there.”
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December 7th, 2007
THE SOUNDS OF NATURE, PART I:
How BBC Natural History Producers Use Sound Design To Make
The Real World Sound Real
(as printed in the September 2007
edition of TVBEurope)
The BBC nature documentaries, most recently “Planet Earth” (2006), have invariably offered stunning image upon stunning image, showing us scenes few people in world have ever glimpsed before.
“Planet Earth” featured spectacular helicopter shots using the Cineflex camera mount that allowed an unparalleled intimacy. We raced along with wolves chasing down caribou – the terrified caribou huffing, the desperate footfalls trying to outrace each other. “The Blue Planet” (2001) showed us stunning scenes of hunting dolphins whooshing through the water like rockets. “The Private Life Of Plants” (1995) showed a scraping, crunching bramble in time lapse as it crept its ruthless way to dominance.
In each of these sequences we were treated not only to visual wonders, but to the intimate soundscapes that accompanied them. Via the sounds it made, we could tell whether a subject was wet or dry, angry or tired, close or far, cautious or hell-bent.
So fans may be shocked to learn:
When the heart-pounding footage of the caribou chase was actually shot, the only sounds that could be heard were the roar of the helicopter and shouted communications among the camera crew, producer and pilot. And those mesmerizing sounds of the growing bramble? Of course, no one has ever heard the sound of a bramble growing, much less recorded it.
The truth is that, with the exception of those shots in which Sir David Attenborough addresses the camera crouched behind a bush, the great mass of a nature documentary soundtrack is deliberately and meticulously constructed in post-production. Atmospheres and sound effects may be gathered on location, but these are virtually never captured simultaneously with picture.
Some might find this disappointing, but upon closer study what is revealed is the incredible creative machinery that makes for a first-rate nature documentary, the apex of which is “Planet Earth”, featuring a 5.1 surround mix as sophisticated, as that of any science fiction movie.
I spoke with veteran nature producer Huw Cordey about his approach to the sound design of the landmark shows he’s worked ono, including “The Life Of Mammals” (2003), “Planet Earth”, and most recently the BBC documentary, “South Pacific”. Cordey’s work as a producer covers as wide a spectrum as any in the industry, going from spending days beneath the surface of the earth in one of the most spectacular caves in the world to making creative – at times purely artistic – decisions in the post-production process. In fact, it could be said that the sound editing stage is the most creative of the entire natural history cinematic process.
“You ignore sound at your peril,” Cordey began, “It tends not to be noticed – unless it’s bad, then everybody notices it. Often when I start talking about sound there’s this huge sense of disappointment. Until they understand it, there’s an initial feeling that you’ve broken the rules of documentary.”
Of course, this exposes the nature of all documentaries, and raises again the eternal discussison of whether objectivity is ever possible once the camera starts running. It is the job of the nature documentary producer to make these aesthetic decisions virtually invisible, so that as little as possible comes between the viewer and the experience of really being there in the wild.
One of Cordey’s great adventures on “Planet Earth” was the filming of the exceedingly rare wild Bactrian Camel in the icy wastes of the Gobi Desert. The extremely long lenses and camera stabilization equipment allowed intimate glimpses into the lives of these animals. Months of waiting produced only a few minutes of footage, but those few minutes were precious. Simultaneously recording the animals’ sound was not even on the table.
Watch the “Making Of” short documenting Planet Earth shoot in the Gobi Desert at Discovery.com
But the final sequence is filled with the subtle grunts, snorts, and rumbles of the camels, which make a memorable sequence verge on the magical. These camel effects were recorded by the crew on a Mongolian breeding preserve. Their domesticated status allowed recordings up close and personal. Such sound effects can describe the visceral shape and flavour of a subject in a way that the image cannot quite match.
On “The Life Of Mammals”, Cordey’s crew was very lucky to capture footage of a babirusa, a wild pig of Indonesia armed with spectacular tusks. They were not able, However, to record sound of the animal. The BBC’s massive sound libraries came to the rescue and the grunts and squeals of a real babirusa were located and employed in the final sequence. These babirusa effects had been originally been recorded in London Zoo in 1932.
It is a matter of pride on the BBC docs that the natural sounds, though not recorded in the same time and place as the images – or even in the same century –maintain impeccable scientific accuracy. Atmospheric tracks are collected at the location whenever possible, or – as is increasingly the case – existing library sound of the actual location is used. A jungle is never simply a jungle. If the original shoot took place in the Amazon, only atmospheric ambience and effects from the Amazon are employed.
This points out the superior longevity an audio library can have. It would be virtually impossible to cut in stock video or film footage into “Planet Earth”, for example. Sound effects, on the other hand, in part because they contain less data are far more forgiving of post-production equalization or digital clean-up and can lend themselves to a wider variety of uses. In addition, they are not always inextricably bound to a specific time, place, or action.
Until about 2001, the BBC deployed dedicated sound recordists to the locations with the camera crews. They recorded atmospheres, effects, and the location narratives of Sir David Attenborough, and others, either boomed or fitted with a lavalier radio mic. The library of past sound recordings has become so vast, that sending a dedicated sound recordist on a shoot is not a priority, in the absence of an on-location presenter. Producers have sometimes taken up the slack and, in a pinch, acted as the shoot’s location sound recordists. DAT’s advent as the sound equipment of choice, replacing larger, heavier analog recorders, made it all the easier for a limited crew to manage the recording.
But the animal you are most likely to hear in any nature documentary is a human being. All the non-essential sounds, the creeping footsteps of a lion, the rustle and crunch of a lizard devouring a spider, are all done in foley sessions.
“In a project I worked on a long time ago, we had a shot where a monkey was tearing the husk off a a coconut. The foley artist used gaffer tape peeling off a camera case.” The foley done on tentpole projects like “Planet Earth” is among the most sophisticated that foley artists can do. It requires skill and experience, and competent editing and mixing, to convincingly create the sound of a polar bear’s feet in the snow with no other sounds available in the Arctic waste to mask any problem spots.
“We delivered ‘Planet Earth’ on 5.1 surround. I think one of the great developments for TV is better sound. Look at our television sets – fantastic picture, but usually with just a tinny little speaker next to it. It’s always the weakest part. Why do people enjoy going out to see things on the big screen? Very often I think it’s the sound that has you on the edge of your seat. ‘Planet Earth’ is all about a cinema-style experience and sound is used to enhance that experience.”
October 21st, 2007
Turner’s Steve Fish: Wrapping the Future In MXF
by
Neal Romanek
(originally published in August 2007 issue
Turner Broadcasting has built its formidable media presence, in part, on its ability to handle and manage its assets. The purchasing of the MGM library in 1986 marked just one of the company’s pioneering leaps in repurposing already existing material. It should be no surprise then that Turner should today still be at the forefront of asset management for the 21st century in the person of Steve Fish, VP of Engineering at Turner Broadcasting Europe.
At the Henry Stewart Events DAM conference at the Portman Radisson SAS in London this past June, Mr. Fish delivered a presentation called “The MXF Driven End To End Tapeless Production Proof Of Concept At Turner Broadcasting”, about the MXF (Material Exchange Format) asset management standard. Looking, in his glasses, very much like a Steven Spielberg ca. 1975, but unspooling information like a university physics professor, even those of us still grappling with understanding the format, left substantially enlightened.
Turner is not the only company committed to MXF in its media management. Recently Warner Bros. studios adopted media storage solutions supplied by HP which will allow the movie studio to operate entirely within a 4K video environment. The HP system employs a primitive version of MXF.
In brief, MXF is a set of standards hammered out over the past decade by SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) that describes the parameters of a specific variety of digital wrapper. This envelope can contain a broad spectrum of audio, video, and metadata. The core of the format is called SMPTE 377M, but over 25 additional SMPTE documents both describe and prescribe the various intricacies of the format, all of which are available for download on the SMPTE site (www.smpte.org).
Advantages to the MXF format include its keeping only unique items in multiple versions. If, for example, an additional soundtrack is required for a foreign version of a show, only that new soundtrack need be created for the foreign version. Other types of asset management might require duplicate files for every single different version, which quickly balloons into a massive – potentially absurd – storage problem. MXF also provides a method of putting description metadata into header tracks. One or more may be used and each can be labeled uniquely. A key upside to MXF is its platform-agnostic simplicity and the its forward-thinking design intended to make it a adaptable to future sound and image formats.
The MXF, like many industry standards, a work in progress, adapting to industry changes over time. Some of the original research documents were written as far back as 1997, but the work on honing and streamlining the standard is ongoing. Steve Fish is candid about describing the limitations of MXF. In fact, it is vital that the limitations are openly discussed if better solutions are to be found, particularly as the MXF enters the current period of transition from mere standard to practical deployment.
For one, Fish noted that MXF is still too complex with too many options. He pointed to MPEG2 as an example to learn from. MPEG2, in the early days of its usage, also offered many options and parameter, but ultimately only a few of them were useful and user-friendly for the industry. Such an over-flexible system also makes manufacturers wary of implementing it. Already they are threading the needle in trying to provide the exact technologies their customers want. Having so many options to choose from raises the stakes too high. Also at least 79 specification sets still need to be fixed. SMPTE, like any responsible standards institution, operates with great care and diligence – but not great speed. The fixes will not be solved in the next year, nor would any sane person expect them to be.
Steve Fish emphasizes a lesson learned and practiced at Turner: “Don’t try to change the whole world at once. Don’t try to solve the entire workflow.” Throughout the DAM Conference different versions of this same statement were repeated. In the 1990′s many people had dreams of digital asset management systems that would allow a single person to control an entire production from end to end. Now that we have come back to reality a bit, virtually everyone agrees that not only is it impractical to have a single, universal solution for all data problems in all spheres of the industry, but that such a blanket solution is unwise.
Fish has stated that the goal of MXF is “the creation of a simple system with the potential to be as ubiquitous as tape.” At this year’s NAB Convention in Las Vegas, he oversaw a tech demonstration, of an entire MXF workflow, which surprised even him in how well it worked. True ubiquity of MXF may be some years away, but if the industry does adopt the standard, it will have done so at the end of a lengthy, exhaustive trial period.
Recommended for those wanting to know more are “The MXF Book” the standard text on the format as well as membership in the Advanced Media Workflow Association (www.amwa.tv).
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September 29th, 2007
 Burbank, September 28, 2007 – Two classic films, John Ford’s DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (1939) and the film noir LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) were recently restored by DTS Digital Images utilizing the company’s proprietary Lowry Process (PDF). The films will premiere at the 45th New York Film Festival on October 12. The facility, a division of DTS Digital Cinema, provided full, 2K restoration services on both films. The movies are part of the festival’s retrospective program “In Glorious Technicolor: Martin Scorsese Presents,” sponsored by American Express and The Film Foundation. Scorsese will introduce the films and discuss the importance of preservation prior to the screenings.
“These classic films are an important part of our motion picture history and culture,” says Schawn Belston, vice president of film preservation at 20th Century Fox. “The restoration and preservation of these films was a collaborative effort by Fox, the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. DTS Digital Images restored these and other classic films in our library using the most advanced image processing technology available today. We’re very pleased and excited to see these Hollywood classics projected at the festival.”
DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN were both produced in three-strip Technicolor format. DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK was directed by John Ford with Bert Glennon, ASC and Ray Rennahan, ASC sharing the cinematography credit. LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN was directed by John Stahl. Leon Shamroy, ASC earned an Oscar for Best Color Cinematography for his work on the film.
“DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK presented some of the most difficult types of restoration challenges,” says Mike Inchalik, vice president, Strategy and Marketing, DTS Digital Images. “We were dealing with film elements that were several generations removed from the original. Because of significant fading of the CRIs (color reversal intermediates) in particular, most of the color information from the blue layer of the original camera negative was gone. There were also tricky issues to resolve, including misregistration, flicker, color breathing and grain build-up and image softening that results from the creation of second and third generation film preservation elements.”
Since the original three-strip negatives were no longer available, DTS Digital Images worked from color reversal protection copies and black-and-white YCM separations to reconstruct the films. Those elements were scanned and converted to digital files using IMAGICA film scanners that are specially designed to gently handle older, shrunken films. The images were then restored using the Lowry Process embedded in proprietary DTS software.
“The Lowry Process incorporates some very powerful imaging algorithms that have been fine-tuned over the course of more than 200 major feature film restorations performed over the past eight years,” explains Inchalik. “We’ve put a great deal of energy into inventing the right tools and putting enough computing power behind them.”
Inchalik notes that the original three-strip negatives had shrunk at different rates. As a result, there was significant misregistration photographed into the color reversal copies.
“There’s quite a science to digitally recombining those records and adjusting for the various rates of shrinkage to create a perfectly recombined registered image,” adds Inchalik.
 In both restorations, DTS delivered a new negative, a digital archive, and a new HD master for serving home video markets that are all true to the restored films. The prints that will screen at the New York Film Festival were made from these new negatives.
“Restoring classics like DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN is a tremendous responsibility that we take very seriously,” says Inchalik. “The breathtaking rate of technological change helps us recover and recreate the amazing experience of seeing these cinematic treasures as they were originally meant to be seen, and that’s exciting. Using the Lowry Process, we have also prepared the films for today’s high-definition home viewing environments, and for whatever formats the future brings as well.”
The Preservation Screening Program was created by American Express and The Film Foundation to screen motion pictures that have been preserved/ restored with funding from the Foundation. The goals are to connect today’s moviegoers with film art and culture from the past, and to highlight the importance of film preservation.
The 45th New York Film Festival runs September 28 through October 14 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. The festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and sponsored by Sardinia Region Tourism and The New York Times, features showcases, music documentaries and retrospective films. For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com/nyff.
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August 29th, 2007
It was a no-brainer to put Netflix in my 2005 list, “10 Things I Love About The Film Industry”.
 Netflix really has been revolutionary. By making virtually any DVD available on demand to anyone in the entire USA, it has smashed the local brick & mortar video store irrevocably, and it has altered the way people watch TV and movies as much as TIVO and digital video recorders have changed viewers’ relationship with the broadcast industry.
In the U.K. the most popular DVD-by-mail service is a company called LOVEFiLM.
LOVEFiLM is not Netflix.
The main thing that makes Netflix great is its genuine “on-demand” aspect. If I want to watch “Down By Law” (1986), “Gladiator” (2000), the entire series of “Freaks and Geeks” (1999), and “Andrei Rublev” (1969) – in that order – I will be sent “Down By Law”, “Gladiator”, the entire series of “Freaks and Geeks”, and “Andrei Rublev” – in that order. Rarely, and usually only in the case of extremely popular titles just after release, Netflix will be unable to provide a requested title. This is usually accompanied by ample warning from the company, and a reliable promise that the title will be sent as soon as it is available.
The other key to Netflix’s success – and it is a thing of beauty – is the Rental Queue. The Netflix Rental Queue allows you to fine-tune the order in which you want your movies to arrive. If you want to see Andrei Rublev first, and then “Down By Law”, then split up the discs which comprise “Freaks and Geeks”, maybe with 3 before “Gladiator” and 3 after, well, then no one’s going to stop you. In fact, to us morbidly incurably cinemonks, the populating and ordering and massaging of the queue is an end in itself. It’s a real pleasure to add movie after movie and then try to prioritize them, plan your viewing, create for yourself a 1st rate cinema education for the next year and a half. And of course there’s the maxing out of the queue and having to decide which individual title you will have to remove from the list in order to add another title that you want to watch.
And Netflix also has a good engine that encourages you to rate movies and then gives you solid recommendations based on those ratings.
If I were to make another list, a “List Of Reasons To Return To The USA”, Netflix access would go on it.
But, as I indicated, here in Britain, there is no Netflix. There is LOVEFiLM.
 LOVEFiLM is very much like Netflix – up to the bright red envelopes in which the DVD’s are mailed and the white-on-red, black-bordered logo.
In the same way that minority ethnic groups can make jokes about themselves that no one else can, I being officially – and actually – British have to say that it’s a sad and wretched thing to see, over and over, Britain taking on ideas introduced from the outside and with the enthusiasm of an over-praised child, apply those ideas slap-dash to its own local situation while missing the core of what made the idea good in the first place.
Exhibit A: Mexican Food. What is Mexican food? Well, it’s – generally speaking – simple, meat and vegetables with spices often wrapped in a flour or corn tortilla, etc. I have eaten British-made Mexican food – I kid you not – which has been tuna and peas with chili powder wrapped in a pita. With cheddar cheese sauce.
Exhibit B: Sweet Potatoes. At University of Kent, a Thanksgiving dinner was arranged for the American students. Sweet, no? No. Traditionally, sweet potatoes are served at Thanksgiving. The American students were served sweet … potatoes. Yes, mashed potatoes … sweetened with sugar. There was weeping.
Exhibit C: British rap music and hip-hop. All I have to say is that if you don’t have genuine actual gangsters actually shooting each other with military-issue automatic weapons on a daily basis in your city streets, please, please, please avoid attempting rap music of any kind. It’s embarrassing for all of us.
And so, LOVEFiLM:
LOVEFiLM bills itself as “Europe’s NO. 1 Online DVD Rental Service”, but it offers relatively few continental titles, so I don’t know how seriously to take that assertion.
First off, LOVEFiLM is not a good name. I know some marketing person somewhere really worked hard on it and I appreciate that. But just step back and listen to the word: “Luvfilm”. The fricative “V” and “F” disappear into each other – and they are not helped by that disintegrating “ILM” sound at the end. “Lovfilm” sounds like the last thing a drunk might say before passing out cold on top of his girlfriend. Could we just have one hard consonant, please? Or an “S”? “LOVESFiLM” maybe?
And with the name “LOVEFiLM” you’ve already alienated half of your user base. Because no self-respecting macho-man-with-an-inferiority-complex is going to want to say to his colleagues on a Monday morning: “Hey guys, I joined LOVE-FiLM!” He would be shunned. Even I, who get weepy when Judy Garland sings “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”, am loathe to say “LOVEFiLM” in mixed company.
But that’s nitpicking. LOVEFiLM has a similar engine as Netflix for rating movies, and then getting recommendations back. But it’s vague. And the accuracy of the recommendations doesn’t seem to improve much after a certain amount of rating. Whereas it is a pleasure to rate movies on Netflix and watch your recommendations gaining more and more focus, it’s depressing to rate film after film on LOVEFiLM and get back repeatedly “If you loved ‘The Seventh Seal’, you’ll love ‘Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves’”.
The LOVEFiLM rental queue – called, ironically, a “list” by LOVEFiLM, not a “queue” – is really not much of a queue at all. Whereas Netflix allows you to fine-tune your queued movies via an interface that allows you to assign an ordinal number to each, LOVEFiLM offers you the opportunity to put movies in one of three categories: “HIGH”, “MED”, “LOW” priorities. And that’s it.
The obvious – and typically British – problem this introduces is that it entirely removes the “on demand” aspect that makes DVD-by-mail appealing. The very point of having a rental queue is to be able to watch the movies I want to see exactly when I want to see them.
If I want to see “Down By Law”, “Gladiator”, the entire series of “Freaks and Geeks”, and “Andrei Rublev” – in that order (well, I’m not going to be able to get “Freaks and Geeks” because that is a particularly American tv series that executives somewhere have decided will not translate to the other side of the Atlantic and they are very wrong about that but you may insert your own imagined tv series) – the only way I’m going to have any chance of watching them in the order will be to put the one I want to see next in my HIGH priority list and put all the rest on the MED or LOW priority list. Because if they all go into the HIGH priority bin, they will be sent to me in an unpredictable order selected by some oily fingered worker at the LOVEFiLM distribution plant.
And that, if I’m lucky.
In a recent LOVEFiLM experience, my household received not a single one of the films in our HIGH priority list. We were told, after sending an email query, that none of the half dozen films tagged HIGH were available at present. And so, we were sent randomly selected titles from our very long MED priority list – one of these titles was a dull reality tv show about families building their new houses. That MED priority section can be a real quagmire of impulse clicks. We did watch the show. But our weekend was ruined. A queue that allowed you to put a title like that at the bottom of a long list would easily prevent such tragedies.
There is too the LOW priority section. But, let’s face it, the idea that you would select a bunch of movies so that you could put them in a list marked “Low Priority” – well, it’s kind of idiotic.
In LOVEFiLM’s defense, they do have a system to warn users that there might be a wait for a film. A gray, half-full hour-glass icon indicates: “It is likely there will be a short wait for this title.” A red, full hour-glass icon indicates: “It is likely there will be a long wait for this title.” However, I have yet to see the icon next to any of the HIGH priority movies we have requested that we have been refused.
The impression one gets, as a user of the service, is that LOVEFiLM wants to make it as easy on themselves as possible, but still get you to give them money. Apparently, it’s working because we continue to give them money.
I want to make clear that LOVEFiLM is not lousy. The service is perfectly adequate. But given the technology, expertise, and creative fire so readily available in this wide wired world of the 21st century, “adequate” is now synonymous with “insulting”.
If you want to become a multi-millionaire in Britain, you can – as I’ve said before – open a good, authentic Mexican restaurant. Or you can offer us the DVD-by-mail service that we deserve.
July 2nd, 2007
Last week, I attended the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Conference, hosted by Henry Stewart Events at the Radisson SAS Portman Hotel, near Marble Arch. The DAM Conferences are held throughout the year, with events also in New York, Amsterdam, and Paris.
And what IS Digital Asset Management? A participant asked a conference panel this question in the last 15 minutes of a Q&A session. The moderator replied: “I’m sorry we only have 15 minutes.” The attendees laughed with that extra self-congratulatory edge of an inside joke received.
The current definition at Wikipedia is as simple and concise as any: “DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT consists of tasks and decisions surrounding ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storage and retrieval of digital assets, such as digital photographs, animations, videos and music.”
It’s worth noting that the term “Digital Asset Management” is actually on the wane, and is being replaced by “Media Asset Management”. The thinking seems to be that since virtually all information can be stored digitally, the word “Digital” is no more a helpful descriptor than the word “electric” would be to describe a lightbulb. All lightbulbs use electricity; all image, sound and text media can be reduced to a file on a hard drive.
All those years ago, at the turn of the century, media companies looked forward to a dazzling future in which a single DAM system would usher a piece of content through the entire enterprise, from conception to production to exhibition to archiving to repurposing. Any individual – with the proper permissions – could track and retrieve any image, any audio file, any video from anywhere at anytime.
It was the consensus in more than one panel I attended at the DAM Conference that this ideal has essentially been abandoned. Enterprises are resigned to having multiple – and sometimes not even compatible – DAM / MAM systems operating. And, in fact, that is perfectly fine.
We love our technology. It seems to be human nature to want to acquire the one system that does everything with one press of one button. But, as we well know, when such a thing occurs, we get antsy about having to press that one button, and we look forward to the day when there will be a great leap forward in which all button pressing is eliminated. And should that day come, well, then we will look forward to the time when we do not have to even be present at all, etc. We’re never happy, are we?
In practical terms, the use of multiple systems – by all reports – works well in media companies across Britain. In fact, I would argue that a single blanket solution for all data storage issues, is too much putting of all eggs in one basket. A modest diversity among the solutions your company selects to store its media at different points along the chain is probably sensible and may be more forgiving of errors made at different points along the way. One problem with a universal solution is that it can also lead to problems which are equally universal.
June 9th, 2007
Paul Bamborough & Codex:
The Man Who Developed Lightworks
Brings Us The iPod Of Professional Video Capture
by Neal Romanek
(as printed in TVBEurope, Europe’s television technology business magazine)
I recently had the privilege of getting an hour with post-production pioneer Paul Bamborough at the Soho, London offices of Codex Digital.
Paul Bamborough was the key developer of the Lightworks editing system. Though Avid eventually became the industry standard, in a “Beta vs. VHS” style argument, some still maintain that Lightworks was the better system.
 With a Sci-Tech Oscar on his mantle, Paul left the film and video hardware development business for good, leaving behind one “if”. If Lightworks developer Delwyn Holroyd had a project in mind, Paul would back it. Holroyd was a key engineer at Lightworks and had developed the company’s Newsworks product.
A few years ago, Delwyn left his job as a senior developer at 5D Solutions Ltd. and made the call.
The Project? Design a reliable digital recording system that really worked, across all formats, that was easy to use, and virtually indestructible inside and out. And also why not make it able to record and replay uncompressed 4K video at the touch of a button.
Multiple companies had accomplished any one or two of these goals, but the whole, unified package had yet to come about.
The fruit of their labors is Codex – a shock-mounted RAID-based portable digital recorder with a simple intuitive interface. The name “Codex” sounds high-tech, but the word literally refers to the earliest books, which during the centuries of the Roman Empire, replaced scrolls as the dominant mode of storing the written word.
It was a foregone conclusion to Paul and the Codex developers that hard disks would replace film and tape – sooner rather than later.
“People will shoot everything digitally,” Paul said “And it’s going to happen quicker than most people think, just in the way it happened in still photography. And when it does happen, I think it’ll happen fairly quickly.”
In fact, David Fincher shot the feature film “Zodiac” capturing all his footage to a JBOD digital recorder made by Codex competitor, S-Two.
There are echoes of the 1990′s transition to non-linear editing systems – déjà vu for Paul. When he first introduced Lightworks to tape and film editors, everyone agreed that it was the future of post-production, and that it was coming down the pike quickly. Still, most editors or post-production companies were unwilling to take the plunge.
Technological adaptation often takes on a herd mentality, which can be smart strategy in an industry where millions of dollars are at stake. A herd provides safety. Decisions are made slowly, risk is diluted among a large number of participants. But when changes come, they are often sudden and absolute. It can become a matter of submitting to the change or getting trampled.
Paul said of those early days at Lightworks: “There was a six to nine month period in which we sold about five machines, but what we did during that period is kept talking to people and we trained a lot of young people who could absolutely see that digital editing was their future. Then quite suddenly people said ‘maybe it’s time to do this’. We went, overnight almost, from having sold 5 machines to selling 100.”
T hough Codex has been meticulously designed, piece by piece, from the ground up, the technology itself is not revolutionary. “It’s putting a bunch of stuff together which, on its own, is fairly familiar. There’s nothing particularly new in this, it’s just very careful engineering of well-known things.”
Inside, the Codex contains a fairly straightforward RAID 3, but it operates at one gigabyte per second bandwidth and is built to withstand extreme conditions of shock and temperature. “We can record just about anything built, and usually at considerably more than 24 frames a second. We can record them at 60 frames a second. We can record two cameras at once. We want to be able to handle whatever is thrown at us. We don’t want to be the limiting factor.”
I had seen Codex at work at the Axis Films HD camera tests in February, and told Paul that my initial impression was that the Codex box seemed like the iPod of digital disk recorders. The machine seemed simple, intuitive, slick.
“Making it slick is very non-trivial,” Paul explained, “Delwyn is just about the best engineer we’ve worked with. He is very good at making certain things actually work. There’s an awful lot of stuff out there that sort of works, but we’re trying very, very hard to make what we do actually work in such a way that nobody has to mess with it.”
Paul believes the iPod’s development is not a bad analog for the Codex story:
“There were a lot of mp3 players around in the late nineties. And they were competing with each other to add more and more and more features, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. What you wanted was to play your music, and it was just this side of impossible to get any of those machines to do it. Then Apple comes along and says: ‘Okay, we’re just going to make THIS. It’s much simpler, it only does one thing. And also we’re going to make it simple to operate.’ And everybody looked at it and said, ‘Yeah! That’s what we wanted!’ It’s not a bad thing to emulate – attempt to find what people actually want to do and make certain you do exactly that.”
Once video is captured on Codex it is, literally, immediately ready for post-production. The recorder’s ability to output uncompressed video, allows a production team to instantly see its footage in real time, which brings multiple advantages.
Paul illustrated with the story of a recent motion control shoot which recorded its footage to Codex. Several production decisions were made halfway through the shoot which called into question the usability of all the motion control footage previously shot. Faced with the nightmare of having to reshoot everything, it was remembered that a crew member had After Effects on his laptop. A cable from Codex to the laptop allowed a few test composites, at full resolution, and it was confirmed within 15 minutes that indeed the production could go forward. Shooting to any other medium would have demanded reshoots, for safety’s sake. “You never need leave a set without knowing whether or not you got what you came to get.”
But Codex has no hope of becoming an industry standard until producers, executives, and insurance companies are convinced. It looks as if Codex might be the hard disk recorder of choice for at least two major tent-pole feature films this year, so it is beginning to prove itself on studio lots. How it will work on a location shoot in India, or on the ski slopes of Alps, will be known before too long.
With the changeover to a completely digital workflow, if it isn’t Codex that is going to the job, it will be another recorder like it. Though, in truth, even that isn’t a certainty.
Paul says, “On the whole, in this new world, very few people know what they’re doing. But even more interestingly, they know that they don’t know. They will admit it.”
Paul Bamborough may be one of the few exceptions to that very rule.
April 25th, 2007
When you watch BBC-produced “Planet Earth” – an 11-part wildlife series making its US premiere March 25 on Discovery – you probably become very angry at the increasing use of CGI in nature documentaries.
Should someone somehow convince you that, in fact, no CGI was used in “Planet Earth”, it’s still going to be hard to swallow the absurd assertion that the series was shot in HD.
 In the studio, the transition from film to video has been relatively smooth. Monitored soundstage conditions have helped HD along in its progress toward become the standard motion picture recording medium. But the wild unpredictable world of documentary filmmaking, where the authenticity and transparency of the image are of paramount importance gives HD technology the chance to really show its colors – or its flaws.
“Planet Earth” is another product of what must be one of the consistently great filmmaking entities of the last 30 years – the BBC documentary department, often in collaboration with Sir David Attenborough. From the beginning of Attenborough’s tenure at the BBC in the 1970′s, the BBC pushed the envelope of what the nature documentary could be. He demanded the best technology and technicians, providing the best footage and the best science available. In a sense, every documentary series the BBC has produced has been an attempt to outdo the last one.
Alastair Fothergill, executive producer of “Planet Earth”, had been producing groundbreaking wildlife series with Attenborough since “The Trials of Life” in 1990. It was Fothergill who brought nature documentaries fully into the 21st century, by deciding to invest in equipment and techniques normally out of the budget range of nature films.
As a result, “Planet Earth” features extraordinary images of a type and quality previously only visible in the realm of big-budget commercials and features.
 The workhorse camera of the series was the Panasonic VariCam HD, chosen because of its distinctly clean image and variable frame rate. The Sony HD Cam was also used in several instances. In a couple instances, where the loss of an HD camera would prove too great a risk for the continuation of the shoot – in the remote jungles of Guyana, for instance, and also a year-long Antarctic shoot – 35mm and Super 16mm cameras were used, because they were known quantities and parts could be easily replaced in the event of a breakdown. However the Panasonic VariCam endured enough environmental adversity in deserts, mountains, caves, oceans, and forests to prove itself to be admirably rugged and reliable.
Another advantage of shooting in HD was the simple, but priceless, ability to look at footage on a daily basis. Nature documentaries, relying heavily on shooting film, are also in the precarious position of never being certain of the footage quality until it returns from the lab. A great deal of time, money, and effort might be spent capturing a natural phenomenon likely to last only a couple days, only to discover a week later that it was all for naught. Looking at real “dailies” also aided in planning the next day’s shoot.
The dilation and compression of time is a tour-de-force element of “Planet Earth”. The series used, for the first time on a major wildlife program, digital cameras for time-lapse sequences. Digital still cameras captured images which were turned into QuickTime movies, and these were then rendered out to high definition images. The same benefit conferred by shooting real time HD footage was enjoyed in the time-lapse sequences. Progress on the time-lapse could easily be checked on a laptop, again reducing the chance of potential surprises when the footage was finally replayed at speed. Producer Huw Cordey, veteran of David Attenborough’s “The Life of Mammals” series, shot jungle, desert and cave sequences on “Planet Earth” and used digital time-lapse extensively: “One of the biggest problems with doing a time-lapse, because you’re not actually watching it in the time-scale that you’re filming it, is you can’t tell if it’s any good or not until you’ve seen it. Shooting film, so many of these time-lapses would be N.G. The ability to look at it saves you a lot of time, and in the end you get better sequences and better shots.”
 Super 16 Arri SR2 cameras were used for high-speed shooting up to 150 fps, but “Planet Earth’s” staggering super-slow motion scenes – including shots of the unique and terrifying great white attacks on seals off the coast of South Africa – used digital technology. These slow motion scenes were shot at up to 400 fps using a Photron camera. Photron has made cameras for a variety of high speed purposes, including industrial crash-testing, since the 1970′s. The Photron camera used on “Planet Earth” is continuously running, recording to a hard drive, always maintaining a 2.5 second cache, so when the camera was activated, two-and-a-half seconds of footage previous to the “start” point has already been recorded. This allowed capture of the entirety of sudden and unpredictable moments which would have been a monumental challenge to shoot on film. “Planet Earth” was the first production to use the Photron system in the field, let alone out on the open ocean shooting great whites, or the deep jungle shooting flying frogs.
Another “Planet Earth” highlight is the series’ stunning aerial footage, which employed the Cineflex camera stabilization system. Helicopter shots can defeat their own purpose on wildlife shoots, because the noise and motion of the helicopter frighten any wildlife the helicopter approaches. The Cineflex allowed the helicopter to shoot from a long way off with animals unaware they were being observed. The Cineflex has been used widely on feature films, commercials, and news. This is the first time it has been used in a documentary. Operated by via joystick, the system consists of a gyro stabilized camera system that sits in a 14.5 inch diameter ball turret in the nose of a helicopter. It is comprised of five rotating axes, three of which are gyro-stabilized. Its stability allows use of very long lenses which be impossible to keep stable in a standard mount. A 40x zoom lens was used for “Planet Earth”.
The shooting of HD using the Cineflex brought other benefits too. Compared to bulky 35mm film camera systems, the Cineflex is fairly lightweight at about 85 lbs. In helicopter flight, even a slight weight difference can affect fuel consumption. The savings in weight allowed the aerial crew to stay up in longer, sometimes forthree hours at a time, changing tapes as necessary. A film camera system might necessitate landing after only 11 1/2 minutes – and that’s shooting a thousand foot magazine. As is often case, the simplest solutions prove the most valuable. The convenience factor of HD – not having to land to change film and the lighter system and the savings on time and fuel with the lighter system and not having to land to change film proved invaluable to the crew in terms of time, money, and ability to capture footage.
In addition to springing for technology, Fothergill went for the best crew. Michael Kelem has been the aerial D.P. on dozens of feature films including “Mission: Impossible” and “Black Hawk Down” as well as countless commercials. With over 40 years in the industry, “Planet Earth” was the first documentary he ever shot – as well as being the first production on which he had to please eight different director/producers.
The aerial photography crews consisted of three people: the segment director/producer, a helicopter pilot who was sourced at each location, and Michael Kelem. Working on a documentary brought its own set of creative challenges and also great rewards:
“For me, the shot reveals itself as I’m working. The idea comes to me in the moment and I have to be able to communicate that to the pilot on the spur of the moment and hope that he is able to see what I’m seeing and act upon it because you may only have one chance at it … We might use the topography to create a reveal or use something like a tree to give some foreground motion. Or with a really long zoom lens you can have the background spin wildly as you circle around a central point of focus. In essence, you create the shot as you see the action unfolding in front of you given the circumstances which you’ve just discovered. It’s a challenging way to work but it teaches you to go with your instincts and to be open to all possibilities.”
The series episodes, as presented by the Discovery Channel in the US, are slightly shorter than those that originally aired in the U.K. The original voiceover narration by Sir David Attenborough has been replaced in the US release with a voiceover by Oscar-nominated actress, Sigourney Weaver.
(end)
February 19th, 2007
HD camera shoot out on Shepperton’s Stage E – with free beer and sausage rolls.
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